“But even supposing I had a public rushing after my pictures as if they were a railway series including nurses, babies and bonnet-boxes, I can’t see any justice in your objection. Every painter worth remembering has painted the face he admired most, as often as he could. It is a part of his soul that goes out into his pictures. He diffuses its influence in that way. He puts what he hates into a caricature. He puts what he adores into some sacred, heroic form. If a man could paint the woman he loves a thousand times as the Stella Maris to put courage into the sailors on board a thousand ships, so much the more honor to her. Isn’t that better than painting a piece of staring immodesty and calling it by a worshipful name?”
“Every objection can be answered if you take broad ground enough, Hans: no special question of conduct can be properly settled in that way,” said Deronda, with a touch of peremptoriness. “I might admit all your generalities, and yet be right in saying you ought not to publish Mirah’s face as a model for Berenice. But I give up the question of publicity. I was unreasonable there.” Deronda hesitated a moment. “Still, even as a private affair, there might be good reasons for your not indulging yourself too much in painting her from the point of view you mention. You must feel that her situation at present is a very delicate one; and until she is in more independence, she should be kept as carefully as a bit of Venetian glass, for fear of shaking her out of the safe place she is lodged in. Are you quite sure of your own discretion? Excuse me, Hans. My having found her binds me to watch over her. Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly,” said Hans, turning his face into a good-humored smile. “You have the very justifiable opinion of me that I am likely to shatter all the glass in my way, and break my own skull into the bargain. Quite fair. Since I got into the scrape of being born, everything I have liked best has been a scrape either for myself or somebody else. Everything I have taken to heartily has somehow turned into a scrape. My painting is the last scrape; and I shall be all my life getting out of it. You think now I shall get into a scrape at home. No; I am regenerate. You think I must be over head and ears in love with Mirah. Quite right; so I am. But you think I shall scream and plunge and spoil everything. There you are mistaken—excusably, but transcendently mistaken. I have undergone baptism by immersion. Awe takes care of me. Ask the little mother.”
“You don’t reckon a hopeless love among your scrapes, then,” said Deronda, whose voice seemed to get deeper as Hans’s went higher.
“I don’t mean to call mine hopeless,” said Hans, with provoking coolness, laying down his tools, thrusting his thumbs into his belt, and moving away a little, as if to contemplate his picture more deliberately.
“My dear fellow, you are only preparing misery for yourself,” said Deronda, decisively. “She would not marry a Christian, even if she loved him. Have you heard her—of course you have—heard her speak of her people and her religion?”
“That can’t last,” said Hans. “She will see no Jew who is tolerable. Every male of that race is insupportable—‘insupportably advancing’—his nose.”
“She may rejoin her family. That is what she longs for. Her mother and brother are probably strict Jews.”
“I’ll turn proselyte, if she wishes it,” said Hans, with a shrug and a laugh.
“Don’t talk nonsense, Hans. I thought you professed a serious love for her,” said Deronda, getting heated.